


kith

by angularmomentum



Series: roots [1]
Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Accidental Marriage, Alternate Universe - Harry Potter Setting, Alternate Universe - Magic, M/M, Pining, Semi-Public Sex, Teenagers, Underage - Freeform, comedy of manners, egregious misinterpretation of swedish and pagan mythologies, high school sweethearts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-06
Updated: 2017-05-06
Packaged: 2018-10-28 08:54:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10827951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angularmomentum/pseuds/angularmomentum
Summary: Sasha makes prefect in his second to last year. It's earlier than anyone but him expected, but right on track for his two year plan, which is: be head boy, get a contract to play Quidditch professionally, and beat Bäckström off in the baths.





	kith

**Author's Note:**

  * For [screamlet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/screamlet/gifts), [babygotbackstrom](https://archiveofourown.org/users/babygotbackstrom/gifts).



> Please click through to endnotes for content warnings if you need them!
> 
> This fic is brought to you by my extremely avoidant personality, repeated listens of "Ra-Ra Rasputin" by Boney M and "Africa" by Toto, so no, I don't know either.
> 
> EXTRA HUGE THANKS to my co-conspirators in hockey sin, you know who you are.

Sasha makes prefect in his second to last year. It's earlier than anyone but him expected, but right on track for his two year plan, which is: be head boy, get a contract to play Quidditch professionally, and beat Bäckström off in the baths.

It’s that last part which has been stymying him consistently since Bäckström arrived at Koldovstoretz.

Bäckström is sixteen, almost as tall as Sasha, and looks like a prince dropped unceremoniously on the taiga and forced to make the best of it, which, considering Durmstrang only admits purebloods, he might well be.

Sasha dies quietly every time he sees him. He wants to bite his narrow lips and to bury his hands in the thick fall of his sand-coloured hair. Bäckström seems like he might punch Sasha on the spot of if he did, which is no small part of the attraction.

His eyes are the green of the killing curse, and Sasha is not above writing bad poetry in the margins of his scrolls about it, because even if Bäckström somehow found it, he still can’t read a word of Russian, so Sasha is reasonably certain he’d get away with it.

Not just anyone gets expelled from the oldest wizarding school in Europe. Bäckström must have done something horrible. Sasha is not proud to admit that he hopes it was murder, but neither is he ashamed. At seventeen, one has to begin taking responsibility for one’s predilections, after all, especially if one intends to embark on a mission of seduction through the medium of competitive sports.

_/\\_

The sun only comes back to Koldovstoretz halfway through spring.

When Sasha was eleven this was a novelty, because he’s from Moscow, where the weather is only subzero for a reasonable amount of time and the snow only gets to about a metre high. Now he considers it a dull but advantageous fact of life, because all romantic gestures look better in the twilight, and Sasha himself thinks his angles are best flattered by the warm glow of the constantly-lit fires.

The September Bäckström arrives, the permafrost in Krasnoyarsk is already under twenty centimetres of powdery Arctic snow. He steps around the courtyards glaring icily at the erratic drifts of it lifting his robes and his hair into wild arcs and making a bid to steal his books out of his long, pale hands.

“Let me help,” Sasha says, casting his very best warming charm on them both, suffusing them with a lovely, golden glow that makes Bäckström look burnished and ageless.

“Ugh,” Bäckström says, “now I’m too hot,” in crisp, formal Norse, which Sasha only barely speaks. “Don’t do that again.”

It's perfect.

_/\\_

Bäckström never seems to be affected by anything.

Sasha knows this, because it feels like halfway through winter he has tried everything; Bäckström is unreceptive to being jostled in the halls, he is unmoved by Sasha spilling breakfast on him, and worst of all, he is utterly unflappable on the quidditch pitch.

True, he did seem moderately taken-aback that the Russian style requires a small sapling lifted whole from the earth rather than a broom, and that the pitch is significantly bigger to encompass a snitch that fights back, but he has adapted with rather infuriating aplomb.

Sasha thinks this would be much easier if Bäckström were not quite so good at finding and catching it, and ignoring the little red bites it chews into his bare palms.

Sasha also thinks this would be much easier if he knew more about him, but while Bäckström appears to understand enough Russian to get by in classes, Sasha has never heard him speak it.

If he sometimes lies awake at night imagining what his Swedish accent would do the words: “Sasha, I find you fascinating, please suck my dick,” that is between Sasha and the portraits on the walls of the prefects’ dorm, who have undoubtedly seen worse.

“I don’t get it,” he tells the portrait of Olga Andreyevna Bunina in early November, who can always be relied upon for tips on his technique. “It’s like I’m invisible.”

“Well,” she says, adjusting her wig with one plump hand, “you’re not exactly going about it elegantly, are you? Have you considered a gift? Or, hm—” she reaches under her bust and rummages in the volumes of red taffeta adorning her pleasingly rounded form. “Ah, here we are. A quest!” She shakes what looks like a very tiny book at him, which he cannot, obviously, take. “This has all the very best quests in it. In my day we were all about with a quest or two. I myself once trapped a siren’s song in a bottle for my wife, and she was very pleased.”

“I don’t even know if he likes music,” Sasha confesses, miserably. “I don’t think he knows I exist.”

“Come now, that’s not true,” Olga reminds him. “Why, just yesterday you were telling me he smacked the quaffle at you so hard you almost broke your nose again, even though he’s not even a beater.”

Sasha sighs happily. “He did.”

Olga considers him, one dark eye enlarging hugely as she puts a reading glass to it. “Dear, if you’re going to pleasure yourself, would you mind warning me? There are really only so many times one can stand to listen to the young fumbling about unexpectedly. Also, perhaps you'd consider some better lubricant?”

Sasha feels compelled to explain himself. “It feels better when it hurts a little.”

She grins hugely at him, exposing one of her gold teeth. “I think I begin to see the attraction.”

Sasha lets out another huge sigh, rolling over to stare at the distant, timbered ceiling. “He looks like he’d punch me in the face if I tried to have a conversation with him.”

“Darling,” Olga says, voice dropping a whole register. “Have you really not tried _talking_ to him?”

Sasha’s entire face heats up. He looks miserably over at her through the heavy batik curtains framing his bed.

Olga laughs so loudly the other portraits, generally engaged in studied disinterest of his personal life, hiss a chorus of shushing at her. “Oh, this is wonderful. _Boys,_ honestly. I must tell Petra Sergeyevna.” With that, she gathers her skirts and scuttles out of her frame, leaving one sleepy Pekinese to yawn despondently in Sasha’s direction.

“What would I even say?” he asks it anyway, even though, predictably, the Pekinese just goes back to painted sleep.

_/\\_

By any metric, Bäckström acting weird is not exactly unusual.

Sasha, by dint of his completely normal and measured interest in learning everything about him, has observed him in his natural habitats for several weeks now, and can be considered something of an expert.

For instance: Bäckström’s quidditch tree has a distinctly greenish tint to its translucent ivory leaves, and Sasha swears he’s seen him talking to it, in the corner of the pitch before practice. It flies faster than any of the other saplings, even though Bäckström himself is not really built like a seeker at all, and shouldn’t be so able to make the turns he does.

Bäckström moves strangely at odd moments, and occasionally Sasha thinks he sees a splash of green in him, or smells the wetness of new peat as he passes.

Sometimes Sasha thinks Bäckström is looking at him, but when, in herbology, Sasha attempts to catch his eye over the rock he’s scraping for hallucinogenic lichens, Bäckström is too busy gently stroking his long, thin fingers over the fringe of his own ridged healing mushrooms to notice.

The lichens are particularly gooey going into the winter, and Sasha really doesn’t appreciate getting sprayed with orange spore mist right across the face. For one thing, he likes his face, broken nose and all, and for another, it turns his eyes orange for an hour or two every time, and thus everything starts to look psychedelic and inviting, a truly terrible combination when one has so far failed utterly to make conversation with one’s crush.

Sasha splutters horribly, hoping none of it went in his mouth. Last time it was a truly inconvenient four hours to be high, considering it had almost been inter-disciplinary quidditch finals and the life magic students had been losing their playoffs horribly. This year they have a much better seeker, thanks to Bäckström, and the thought of him on the pitch, straddling his tree, sets Sasha off on a stream of sighs again.

“You really need to stop staring at him,” Olesia, the final year prefect, tells him. She tosses the fall of her waist-length black hair over her shoulder in a fluid arc as they head towards the baths afterwards. “It’s weird.”

“I don’t stare,” Sasha says, trying to focus on Olesia’s voice and not the way the hallway back from the greenhouses is warping slightly away from him every time he reaches out to steady himself on the ice. “Who said that? Did Bäckström say it?”

Olesia snorts, gently directing him around the corner. “You’re hopeless. Why don’t you just sit next to him at dinner?”

“You don’t think he’d kill me?”

“Sasha,” Olesia says, dumping him at the prefects’ bathroom, “if he hasn’t killed you by now, he’s probably not a murderer.”

Sasha tries not to be disappointed. “Wait, but— why was he—"

Olesia shrugs, “Dima thinks he failed necromancy.”

“Nobody ever fails necromancy,” Sasha mutters. Even Sasha, no stranger to blood and injury but distinctly averse to actual corpses, had managed to pass his minimum requirements with a more-or-less fully reanimated cricket.

Through the film over his eyes she looks like a jack-o-lantern, her heavy, epicanthal eyelids falling to half mast over her great, black eyes as she grins enormously. “That you know of. Maybe they just never find the bodies.”

“He’s from Durmstrang, they _invented_ necromancy.” Sasha reminds himself not to cross the death magic students, for at least the third time this week. “What should I say?”

Olesia grins wider, shoving him back into the doorway. “Hi, I’m Sasha. I’m obsessed with you, and all my friends are sick of it?”

“Don’t be mean.”

Olesia fixes him with a look of profound pity. “Sasha. You like it mean.”

He does, damn it. “You’re not helpful.”

“I don’t have to be,” Olesia points out. “Take a bath, you smell like spore.”

If Sasha spends rather longer than is strictly necessary cleaning every part of himself while formulating a plan, that is between Sasha and the hot spring.

By the time he’s finished, he’s mostly sober, the walls are no longer rippling, and everything is just a faintly ochre colour. Sasha runs a quick spell over his robes and decides he might as well go straight to dinner. It’s one of the last ones before the Feast and Sasha won’t be there for that one, and there’s no telling how Bäckström will react to the Hunt.

There is, of course, no particular time limit for his mission of seduction, but Sasha is still mildly under the influence of the lichen and perhaps not making perfect and prefectly decisions, so he goes down by the long stairs, knowing the very bottom of them extends right to the centre of the dining hall.

Dinner has started by the time he arrives, so he gets a fair few nods of acknowledgement as he makes his entrance. He’s not under the illusion that anyone is watching him for a grand gesture, but Sasha feels as though he’s making one anyway when he forgoes the prefect’s table and goes one down to the life magic students’ table and plunks himself down right next to Bäckström on the very end of the bench, where he always sits.

“Hello,” Sasha offers, bumping his knees before drawing back, just in case Bäckström does punch him. “I’ve come to sit with you.”

Bäckström stares at him. “Why?” It’s the first time Sasha has heard him speak Russian. All Sasha’s fantasies about his accent come abruptly and inconveniently true.

There are so many answers Sasha could give, but in the end he settles on a broad grin and a shrug. “I can’t sit with a teammate who’s going to win us the interdisciplinary cup?”

“Nobody wins a cup by themselves,” Bäckström says, slowly, as though he isn’t sure Sasha will understand him.

Sasha scrambles for a better excuse, flustered at his proximity, and the way the ochre film has turned a light gold and everything appears slightly floaty and ephemeral. The dining hall, never loud, seems distant, and Bäckström seems very, very close. “I know,” he mutters. “But you never sit with anyone, and I thought maybe you could use some company.”

Bäckström frowns. “That’s it?”

Sasha, for a brief moment, wonders if the spores have rendered him somehow higher than he’d realised and he’s fatally confessed that Bäckström’s long, straight nose makes him want to stare at it from every angle, and that the rounded height of his cheekbones make Sasha stupid in the air when the wind flushes them pink.

Instead, the silence resolves itself to awkwardness, and something about Bäckström’s suspicion no longer seems like pure hostility. Sasha, instead, thinks maybe there’s a note of confusion in it, as though he can’t quite reconcile anyone coming to sit with him without ulterior motive, and that seems wrong somehow.

Sure, Sasha has ulterior motive as wide as the considerable spread of his arms, but confessing it feels impossible now. It might have been easier if Bäckström had actually lunged across the bench and gone straight for his jugular. “I’ll go if you want,” Sasha murmurs, pitching himself for privacy.

“Do what you like,” Bäckström says, look of confusion deepening. “Are you trying to be nice?”

“I’m not that nice,” Sasha says, and that, at least, is the complete and unvarnished truth.

“I didn’t think so,” Bäckström says, just sharply enough to be defensive.

Bäckström hasn’t punched him, but Sasha can respect a dismissal when he hears one. It’s almost as much of a surprise to Sasha as it appears to be to Bäckström when Sasha conjures a little snitch, almost animate with the charm, and leaves it flitting happily around Bäckström’s plate to keep him company.

_/\\_

Bäckström is not the only foreign student in the senior grouping, but he is certainly in the minority. Funnily enough, most parents outside of Russia seem resistant the idea of sending their precious children to an island at the very top of Krasnoyarsk Krai, happily nestled in the Arctic sea, and only barely kept habitable by the ageing climate spells put in by the founders.

Sasha is willing to admit it’s not an obvious place for a school, as such, but when witches were consistently murdered on the spot, Sasha supposes it made a certain kind of sense to settle in where most humans would take one look, scream, and turn back, if they ever made it up in the first place.

He’d perhaps prefer a few more natural trees, and for the radius of exclusion to have extended rather a bit further south just to prevent the deeply unpleasant encroachment of muggles for reasons of the worst kind of cruelty to each other, but for lack of anything else, it has been a good home away from the lights of Moscow.

The alternative was, of course, Durmstrang, and while Sasha is aware that their strict purity policy has been relaxing somewhat after the ugliness in England, he still doesn’t think he’d have made the cut. His father is a wonderful man, but one without a magical bone in his body, sadly, though he does make mindblowing borscht.

In any case, Sasha has enjoyed becoming intimately familiar with the cracks and sideways spaces of the old place, wood-framed and peat-roofed and enormous under its blanket of snow and ice.

Sasha has also enjoyed staving off homesickness by playing host to the various exchange students that arrive to stay for a week or so, usually by portkey to the glacier.

They always arrive and start coughing. Sasha has won the bet three years running (much to Dima, his nearest competitor’s, chagrin) about how many will turn blue right away and panic at the lung-cracking cold before they step into the habitable zone.

This year, the delegation of three Durmstrangers staying for the Feast of Ullr step out of nowhere onto the ice shelf, and one of them actually manages to keep enough breath for a curse before falling down sideways. “Half a second!” Sasha crows. “Pay up, Dima.”

Orlov rolls his eyes, but he slaps a piece of chocolate into Sasha’s outstretched hand anyway.

“We should help them,” Sasha points out, when the tallest one gasps for breath and doubles over.

“Why don’t they just let portkeys open on the grounds?” Dima says, for the third year in a row. “It gives people a bad impression.”

Sasha blows hot air into his gloves, arms himself with a warming charm and steps out into the howling Arctic wind to greet their visitors. Ah, the privileges of being the head of the Hunt three years running.

“Hello!” He exclaims, in his very best Ancient Norse, which is still terrible. “Welcome!”

The three students stare up at him through rapidly-freezing eyelashes. Sasha casts a warming charm on all three of them, and he is gratified at how much more they appreciate it than Bäckström did. The tallest one, now that he’s not doubled over, is taller than Sasha, which is off-putting, but he’s skinny like a river reed, angular and topped with a puff of light brown hair that makes him look distinctly startled. “Thank God,” he says, in perfectly ordinary Swedish. “How do you live up here?”

“Tack,” Sasha says, because that’s the extent of his vocabulary, despite his determined efforts to learn all the ways the dusty Russian-to-Swedish dictionary lurking malevolently in the back of the library offers to say “I would like to take your trousers off.”

“Dinner is hot,” Dima says, in a significantly better accent. “Do any of you speak Russian?”

“I do,” the tall one offers, intelligibly, if haltingly. “I’m Andre. This is Philipp and Marcus.” He points at a solid boy with a long face and the slim, dark-haired one with a sad fringe of fourteen-year-old fluff clinging to the bottom of his chin. “They don’t.”

“A tragedy,” Sasha proclaims. “Ah, well, the feast will be in Norse, anyway.”

“Hooray,” Dima says, disconsolately.

They trudge the twenty metres back to the boundary, wind pushing them sideways so they enter just on the edge of the forest, already preening itself for the chase and displaying all its most impressive shades of birch and ivory.

“Why is everything grey?” Andre asks.

Sasha is mortally offended. “It’s not _grey._ It’s silver! And— and dove! and—“

“Nicky!” Andre exclaims, straightening from his protective hunch as the marginally more tolerable temperature of the grounds welcomes them in.

The three Durmstrang juniors perk right up at Andre’s shout, and Sasha, for a moment, draws a complete blank, because Andre is loping through the snow to Bäckström, of all people, who is standing stock-still at the edge of the forest, staring back at them with his death-green eyes.

“I thought his name was Lars,” Sasha mutters to Dima, thrown mercilessly off balance.

Dima shakes his head, watching the other two join the little group like erstwhile ducklings. “Come on, Sasha, get your shit together.”

Sasha, though, has lost every semblance of composure he might have gathered from his ceremonial office because when Bäckström smiles up at Andre, displaying a set of even, slightly pointed teeth and deep creases in the corners of his heavy eyelids, Sasha immediately suffers a sudden rush of blood to his unmentionables.

“I have to go,” Sasha says, handing Dima his keys to the guest dorms. “I’m delegating. Bye.”

“Sasha, wait—“

It’s too late, though. Sasha’s entire worldview is threatening to crumble. Bäckström is called Nicky. Bäckström knows how to smile. Bäckström, in fact, has a smile that lights up his entire face, turning him from a living study in long-nosed, aristocratic disinterest into a warm, round-cheeked human boy, and Sasha would very, very much like to unsee it, to save himself space in his mind for other things, like potions, or the formal address of the Hunt, or how best to quickly divest himself of all six of his layers. “See you at dinner!” he yells, in their general direction, before beating a hasty retreat to the dorms.

_/\\_

The Feast of Ullr is usually one of Sasha’s favourite times of the year. The sun hasn’t quite disappeared entirely yet, lending everything a pewter cast and leaving a faint glint on the high, clear ice ceiling of the dining hall as everyone sits down to dinner the night before the hunt.

Classes are suspended for the opening of the season.

In Sasha’s first year, he was chosen to be the stag. It had been the start of what he considers a truly excellent athletic career so far, even if, at the time, the idea of being chased through the forest by every member of the student body had not seemed like much of an honour.

This year, the task of preparing the stag is his, just like last year. He’d been the youngest Master of the Hunt nominated by student majority in centuries. Despite being deeply preoccupied, Sasha does take it seriously, remembering the relief he’d felt when he’d been sitting alone at age eleven in the transfiguration room waiting for Headmaster Kharlamov to arrive and instead been embraced warmly by Datsyuk, Master of the Hunt in his last year.

“It will only hurt a little,” he’d said, as Sasha clung to his robes. “They only choose the strongest to maintain the spells.”

“Was it you?” Sasha asked him.

“Yes.” He’d smoothed Sasha’s dark, thick hair back off his forehead, unruly, even then. “See? I lived.”

In good years, when the sky is cloudless, the aurora spreads in watercolour splashes across the dark sky, leaving every face turned up in silent awe. That year, the skies had been cloudy, and so Sasha had taken his first steps on four legs in almost total darkness, eyes only drawn by the luminosity of the white forest, catching the barest lunar reflection.

Sasha is not prone to religious hyperbole, but he is definitely prone to wonder, and even being immersed in magic for the better part of his life has not erased it.

Sasha misses the feast of the night before to sit with Kuznetsov in the transfiguration room. He holds him close while he tells Sasha how scared he is, and Sasha makes him laugh, telling him about the time he got trapped in the senior bathrooms by an albatross determined to give him a howler from his mother.

Headmaster Kharlamov’s ghost arrives with Headmaster Maltsev, already wearing the white robes and white masks of the witnesses, and they perform the transfiguration in an instant before releasing Kuznetsov into the forest, opening the door straight to the heart of the clearing.

Sasha watches him bound out into the snow and smiles.

“Thank you, Ovechkin,” Headmaster Maltsev says, “you can go.”

Sasha, dismissed, takes his time heading back to the dorms. He walks the long way, under the eaves of peat and timber that overhang into the central courtyard, when he sees movement in the corner of his eye.

In the distance, at the treeline, there are three figures. Two are in the striking blood-coloured Durmstrang robes, visible as a spalsh of red even in the murky darkness. One is in the birch-silver of Kholdovstoretz, his hair a burnished, golden contrast to the heavy draping of winter-coloured wool.

Sasha, against the vestiges of his better judgment, cuts across the courtyard towards them. If pressed, he can always claim he’s only doing his duty as a prefect and making sure nobody is getting into intolerable mischief on a ceremonial night. Bäckström did, after all, get expelled from his previous school. Sasha should check on them.

They’re speaking in rapid-fire Swedish. Andre has his arms around Bäckström while Marcus looks on, pointing at the forest and saying something that sounds moderately angry, though that could easily be the speed of his words and what Sasha perceives as a total lack of pauses for breath.

He clears his throat. “Hello, Swedes.”

Bäckström glares at him, shrugging out of Andre’s lanky arms. “What do you want?”

There is a light snow falling, and the white softness of it is dusting Bäckström’s hair and melting on his cheekbones.

“I—“ Sasha is very rarely lost for words, but he is operating on a sudden decrease of cognitive function, so he gives himself a moment. “I’m a prefect,” he says, nonsensically. “What are you doing?”

They exchange a flurry of words too quick for Sasha to follow, but he thinks it sounds argumentative, Andre gesturing plaintively at Sasha while Marcus crosses his arms and looks up at them with a set frown.

It’s Bäckström who cuts them off. “It’s my birthday,” he says, sharply, looking at Sasha as though daring him to make a comment about the fact that it is not, in fact, an answer to Sasha’s question.

“Why didn’t you say so?” Sasha blurts, fixated on the snow resting on the frosted edges of Bäckström’s pale eyelashes. “Good birthday!”

Andre snorts. Marcus mostly looks confused.

Bäckström looks at him with undisguised suspicion. “That’s it?”

“We’re about to hunt a student to first blood for the favour of an ancient god,” Sasha points out. “Everyone born on a festival night has a good birthday.” He pauses. Bäckström hasn’t punched him yet, though he still looks like he’s considering it. “Do you want to celebrate? I missed the feast.” Andre translates for Marcus, then they engage in a quick discussion that sounds weirdly musical before Sasha gets flustered with how Bäckström is looking at him, one side of his small mouth lifting incrementally in something that might be the very beginnings of a snarl.

“Look,” Sasha says, “why don’t I just—“ He pulls out his wand, but before he can do anything, Bäckström, wandless, whispers “ _yfir mal._ ”

Sasha feels spiked in the eyes, pain of it briefly blinding, and then what was previously unintelligible Swedish becomes Andre saying “oh, for fuck’s sake Marcus, he’s clearly too gone on Ni—“ before he stops, seeming to realise what Bäckström has done.

“How—“ Sasha starts, before he gets his breath back.

“It’ll be easier this way,” Bäckström says, direct and unrepentant. “You were saying something about a celebration.”

“I can’t believe this is happening,” Sasha says, because his words feel stream-like, fluid, rushing to come out.

“You’ll get used to it,” Bäckström says. “It’s not permanent.”

“That doesn’t make it better!” Sasha manages. “You— where’s your wand?”

Andre laughs. “He doesn’t—“

“Shut up, Burky,” Bäckström says, evenly. “Does this celebration of yours involve firewhiskey?”

Sasha’s confusion melts into the background, replaced immediately by offense. “Ugh,” he says, his brain still feeling unfiltered and sloshy. “No firewhiskey. We’re in Russia, we get wrecked on vodka, like men.”

“Does he know he’s a stereotype?” Marcus asks, as though he’s forgotten Sasha understands him now.

“Lead the way,” Bäckström says, after a considerable pause, making all of Sasha’s illicit dreams come true.

It occurs to Sasha to wonder why Bäckström is so amenable to distraction all of a sudden, but it’s an echoing clamour, like the bells of a church, or the distant baying of hounds.

_/\\_ 

“Oh, is this him?” Olga gets out her glass again, peering intently as Sasha leads them all back to his room. He’s got it to himself this year, despite the second bed. Student enrolment hasn’t exactly been at an all time high recently, now that Russian students can seek out other institutions. Sasha himself sometimes wonders about popping a portkey over to Hogwarts to see how Zhenya is doing, or dropping in on the Canadians to check on their quidditch prospects, but ultimately, Sasha is as tied to Russia as he is to Koldovstoretz. He’s bled for it, and that’s nothing to take lightly.

Bäckström bows to Olga, still with that little lift to his lips as Andre and Marcus snoop around the edges of the room then throw themselves onto the second bed, kicking up a puff of dust from the furs, which raises a storm of coughing.

“Charmed,” Bäckström says, hand on his heart.

“Darling,” Olga exclaims to Sasha, “he’s very beautiful. You didn’t say he was a—“

“A newcomer,” Bäckström says, “still finding his feet.”

Olga peers at him, blinking owlishly from her frame. “I see. Welcome, welcome. Sasha has told me ever so much about you.”

“Has he?” Bäckström seems genuinely taken aback. “What does he know?”

There is an awkward silence. Andre coughs, then slaps a hand over his mouth to stifle the rest of it.

“He says you’re quite delightfully violent at quidditch,” Olga says, displaying tact Sasha had thought her incapable of, and the fondness he feels for her surges multifold.

Marcus starts laughing and doesn’t stop, until Andre starts hitting him with one of the old pillows, feathers and fur beginning to roil with the commotion. Sasha chose the bed next to the wall for a reason. “Hey! That one’s temperamental, be careful!”

He can’t be certain it would swallow them, but every set of clothing Sasha has laid on it and turned his back on has definitively disappeared, and he’d rather not have to explain where and how he lost two out of three of their Durmstrang visitors.

Andre and Marcus stare at him, Andre straddling Marcus’ hips before they separate, sliding slowly off the now agitated bed.

The bed wheezes a long sigh.

“Such a shame,” Olga pronounces in the silence. “It’s been ages since it had a good meal.”

Sasha rummages in his clothes chest, seeking out the bottle of ghost-apple vodka his mother sent him away with in September. He’s been saving it for after the quidditch season, when the strange susceptibility for bruising it produces is a less irritating byproduct of its terrific euphoria, but he feels now is as good a time as any to break it out.

He sits on his bed and cracks the seal with the tip of his wand, and the room is immediately filled with the scent of the air before a fierce cold snap. It’s indescribable to anyone but someone who has been in the Arctic, that autumn breath like holding before a deep dive, when all the world begins to pare down to snow and ice and stone.

“Oh,” Bäckström whispers.

“Oh,” Sasha confirms, patting the bed next to him, draped in reindeer fur and a multitude of lilac-grey blankets. “Here. Happy birthday, Bäckström.”

Bäckström sits next to him. Sasha is unprepared for the heat he throws off, close enough to almost touch and burning like a furnace under his robes. “You can call me Nicky,” he says, quietly, staring past the bottle at Sasha, eyes fixed on his face. “You really want to share this?”

Sasha offers him the bottle, and the rest of the room falls away; Andre and Marcus might as well be gone for all the attention Sasha is paying them, and Olga’s happy chatter becomes nothing but a shushing of breath as Sasha watches Bäckström’s lips touch the rim of the bottle and drink.

The flush that spreads across his cheekbones might paint Sasha’s dreams forever. “Please call me Sasha,” he blurts, unable to keep it in. He desperately wants to hear him say it, that note of warm familiarity enough to hang a hope on.

“We’re going!” Marcus yelps, dragging a visibly reluctant Andre towards the door while Olga waves them off. “See you in the morning. Don’t— don’t do—“

“Oh, hush,” Olga tells them. “Prohibition is so passe.”

The heavy curtain falls back behind the door as Andre shuts it behind them, and then it is just Sasha, and Nicky.

“Oh, would you look at that,” Olga announces to the room at large, “I’m so terribly late for tea.” She vacates her frame in grand style, and then there is the perfect near-silence of two bodies alone. Nicky passes the bottle back, and their fingers brush.

Nicky never wears gloves. Sasha has never noticed how warm he is and how close to the skin his blood seems. “Are you… too hot?” Sasha asks, remembering Bäckström’s — Nicky, Nicky by permission at last— aversion to the warming charm Sasha cast on him in the very beginning of the winter.

“No.” Nicky turns his hands up on his knees, looking down at his ivory palms, flecked with the little red bites the snitch leaves on him every time he catches it. He buries a hand in the fur between them, long fingers spreading through the thick mass of it as though the animal it came from might still feel it. “She wasn’t local,” he says, picking at the stiff guard hairs. “Nothing natural lives up here, does it?”

Sasha takes his first sip of vodka. It bursts on his tongue like a calving iceberg, a seismic crack of alcohol and magic. It makes him feel silvered and reckless, a little bit closer to wild. “That’s not true,” he tells him. “There are— we’re here. We’re living, aren’t we?”

“For a price,” Nicky says, reaching for the bottle. “Don’t you miss— don’t you miss anything? You’re so— you’re so hungry all the time. I can feel it, you know. You’re more alive than this place.”

“What?”

Nicky blinks at him, body going tight and stiff again. “It’s after midnight,” Nicky whispers, curling his knees into his broad chest, cradling the bottle in both hands, inhaling the scent of it before he hands it back, almost a formal offering. “I should go.”

Sasha takes the vodka back, desperately confused and throbbing all over. When Nicky’s fingers brush his, Sasha feels it like a ward against darkness, bright and hot and radiant. The vodka is pressing against the edges of his vision, turning the far reaches of the room white, and for an instant Sasha wants to sink to his knees and beg him to stay.

“See you at the Hunt,” Sasha says instead.

“See you at the Hunt,” Nicky echoes, pressing the very tip of his index finger to the break in the bridge of Sasha’s high nose before he goes.

Sasha slowly tips sideways until he’s laying prone on the bed, but at least he has the wherewithal to cap the vodka before he groans horribly into the pillow.

_/\\_

The morning before the Hunt, Sasha sits at the prefects’ table with Dima and Olesia and nurses what is not a hangover but might be its distant cousin.

Swedish sounds like Swedish again, and in the twilight of morning everything seems more prosaic than it ordinarily would, compared with the dreaminess of the night before. Sasha picks at his breakfast, unusually disinterested in the offerings of thick, black bread and heavy butter. He can’t stop thinking about Nicky’s hands, his quiet voice and penetrating eyes and strange, wandless magic. He cannot stop thinking about what he could have meant by living, when manifestly, they are. Sasha is only flesh and bone and magic like the rest of them.

“Snap out of it,” Dima whispers. “Aren’t you meant to be getting ready soon? You’ve barely eaten.”

Sasha glances at the water clock. It reads at ten minutes until six, and Sasha is, indeed, underfed and running late. He crams his breakfast into his mouth and forces a smile around it, before he claps Dima on the back and goes.

He won’t be needed by the Headmaster until the twilight fades to true night, but Sasha has his own preparations for the moonrise, and he has discovered that taking his time is the best way to make sure he’s ready for it.

He lays out his robes on the bed, adding the pieces he’ll need for the long night ahead. When his boots are in perfect shape and the silver-shot dove grey of his robes is free of every speck of lint and dust, Sasha goes to the baths.

It’s the most important part; Sasha cannot bring scent with him, nothing but the cold and nothing but his living blood beneath it.

Just like the first year, the shock of the iced water chases the air from his lungs and the taste from his mouth, leaving him suspended beneath the surface in shock before his body demands reprieve.

He breaks the surface, gasps for air, and then plunges back under.

Once, twice, and a third time, and then he’s clean.

In the winter, the true darkness comes early. At two, Sasha takes his place in the wide courtyard facing the white forest, at the very head of the student body. The sweep of grey robes looks like the coast of the Arctic sea, a wide semi-circle closing in on all sides, save for the three Durmstrang students sent to hunt with them.

Andre, Marcus and Philipp stand facing Sasha, their backs to the trees.

Somewhere in the sea of grey behind him is Nicky, but Sasha cannot afford to look for him, not when he has a mouthful of words he cannot afford to be robbed of by the sight of him.

Kharlamov’s ghost raises a hand, and in the darkness, Headmaster Maltsev steps out of the trees, hung with a red cowl, an open, faceless mouth. “Welcome,” he says, voice pitched to carry like a cold wind. “Tonight we make our offerings to Ullr, God of the Hunt.” Sasha mouths the words with him, their familiar forms an echo in his chest. “If first blood is drawn before moonset, his favour is cast, and we will have the bounty of life for another year.” He pauses, spreading his arms, white-draped and winglike. He aims his long, slender wand forward, eyes invisible but hand steady as he brings it to bear. “Hounds,” he calls, pointing at the trio in red, “we thank you for your teeth.”

When Sasha was the stag, just before the hounds sank their fangs into the meat of his flanks, everything had been narrowed down to the heat of their breath and the urgency of their pursuit and the strange, flattened world of animal perception. Sasha remembers his shock the year after at seeing their guests transfigured on the spot, turned with ease from human form to that of the enormous, russet-red dogs which had chased him down with such merciless focus.

It is not a shock anymore, but it is still a moment of needed dissonance as Andre, Marcus and Philipp, chosen for their willingness to be Durmstrang’s own temporary sacrifice to the wild, are wrenched out of human form, leaving a triad of lean, hungry predators in their place.

It’s always a reminder of the shape of humanity, that intangible quality of the real, separate from the pageant.

Headmaster Maltsev lowers his wand. “Go well,” he says. “Go swiftly.”

When it is Sasha’s turn to speak, the words come easily, finishing the blessing. “Go forth,” he commands, laying a hand on the head of the largest hound for an instant before he releases him, giving his body to the chase.

As one, they surge towards the trees, a breaking wave over the forest’s stark, leucitic stillness, baying for blood.

_/\\_

Sasha’s entire world becomes his task: follow the hounds. Witness the blood. 

Nobody but Sasha and Kuznetsov, trapped in the body of the stag until the bleed, is meant to be alone tonight. The others hunt as one, building the magic that calls the god; it is communal at its heart. Sasha, standing apart, is both of it and beyond it. He has never been able to tell if he is closer to the god or further from him, but Sasha, pounding through the hip-high snow in well-worn boots and heavy wool is consumed by it nonetheless, the magic in it but too, also, the painful, human limitations of hands and feet and lungs.

He runs, following the trail broken by the chase, with his heart trapped in his throat and his blood pounding out a time signature in his ears, breath a sharp counterpoint in gouts of steam.

He has never fixed his broken nose, or sought to replace the tooth lost in his first hunt as chase instead of quarry. It would feel wrong, somehow, to alter the marks it has left on his body, even as he knows they would be an easy fix, and he will leave Koldovstoretz in no more than another year and a half. That has never been the point. Quidditch is as a good an excuse as any not to, when its violence is an accepted part of the game, but Sasha will always keep his own counsel when it comes to what he leaves here when he goes.

Ahead of him, flashing red through the trees, a hound pauses, throws his head back and howls.

Every hair on Sasha’s body raises at once. The first scenting stills the whole forest, sound a piercing, mournful clarion in the frozen air.

Sasha stops, breathing it in, and closes his eyes.

Above him, the aurora is sweeping across the sky, falling down between the trees, a great cosmic indifference in sheets of green through the membrane of his eyelids.

When he opens his eyes to see which way the hounds will take him, Nicky is next to him.

Sasha’s breath catches hard in his chest. It’s wrong, it’s all wrong for Nicky to be here, but nothing in Sasha wants to reject him. The logic of it — how did he get here, what is he doing— is lost somehow, just beyond the reach of Sasha’s fingers. Instead, there is a surge of painful, human joy under the catch of his ribs, Sasha’s body straining under the lightness of it.

Nicky’s eyes are entirely pupil in the eerie green light of the borealis, great pools of black in his forest-white face. He looks at Sasha as though he’s looking through him.

Sasha has always loved the cold, loved it deeply and in the full knowledge of its danger and its indifference to him. In the same way he loves fire for its warmth, he has always loved that the cold takes from all indiscriminately, that at its lowest point it burns in just the same way.

Nicky looks like a thing of ice, like he is a part of the forest, magical at its base.

Trees don’t grow in the Arctic. White leaves don’t feel the touch of the sun. Human life maintains the unnatural even as people remain things of transience.

Sasha thinks, suspended by the sight of him, that he might understand a bit what Nicky meant when he said nothing lives up here without a price.

“This way,” Nicky says, his voice like the rustle of brittle leaves. Sasha can’t tell what language he’s speaking, but it strikes like a bell, a command for Sasha to follow.

“How—“ he asks, or tires to, but the words are gone, stripped out of his throat.

Nicky takes off, running through the snow as though the forest itself is cutting him a path.

Sasha’s breath comes back in a rush. The hounds run, and so does he, only this time he’s following the human figure in grey, running with robes and hair streaming out behind him, a beacon like woodsmoke between the birches.

It should occur to Sasha to worry. It should occur to Sasha that form and ritual are as vital to the magic of the hunt as the blooding, but the feeling of it— the feeling of it is vital, alive, drawn from the howling bloodlust of Ullr yet unlike it, a ghostly drag of joy suffusing him as though someone has drawn a finger down the ridge of his spine. Chasing Nicky feels right in a way that is utterly indescribable, a rush unlike any other.

Sasha has never felt the forest the way he feels it now, the magical boundary surrounding them, protecting them from the burning cold of the Arctic seeming to shake off a long slumber, leaves rustling in a phantom wind, as though Nicky’s passing has roused them somehow, just as it is rousing Sasha.

Where Sasha has to bat away branches, has to endure the whip of saplings and the drag of leaves, Nicky is untouched, leaving footprints for Sasha to follow.

“Sasha,” Nicky calls, barefoot — has he always been barefoot? Is he cold? No, that’s not — “Come on. Faster.”

Sasha is not a hound to be summoned by a master, but as Nicky bounds through the frost-rimed trees and into the blood clearing, he follows.

The hounds have circled the stag, three of them keeping him penned in the middle, teeth bared, waiting for Sasha’s command.

They are the only living beings in the clearing, three hounds, one white stag, chest and sides heaving as his eyes dart from red mouth to red mouth, to Sasha, neglectful Huntsman who has outpaced his field, and Nicky, tall and broad and eerily delighted, barefoot in the snow.

“What are you waiting for?” Nicky sounds like himself again; a touch imperious, if Sasha is being honest, with an undertone he’s not sure he’s hearing right, a layer beneath which implies somehow that Nicky is laughing. Sasha wants to kiss him so badly his teeth ache from clenching them.

“I—“

“Call it,” Nicky says, extending a bare hand, luminous in the darkness.

Sasha feels for an instant as though all the world is holding its breath before he takes it. Nicky’s palm is a furnace, a brand, every fantasy Sasha’s ever had made manifest in the delicate architecture of his fingers.

The fire is immediate, surging through Sasha like the best ghost-apple vodka in the world. If he’d known what touching Nicky would be like before this he might have thought twice about it, honestly because Sasha is gone, gone, gone.

It’s all wrong, but it feels like the only thing he was ever going to do when he pulls Nicky forward towards the hounds.

The hounds leap on the stag as Sasha hits a dead run. The largest one sinks his teeth into the stag’s broad flank, and the scent of blood fills the empty air as the stag screams.

This is the part that Sasha remembers best; it hurts. It had hurt. Of course it had hurt. Nothing living without a price, Nicky said, and Sasha hadn’t known exactly what he meant, but as the blood hits the snow in a wide arc, he realises — abruptly, too late — that he has not led the witnesses, that they’re alone, that the clearing is empty of eyes but theirs, and the stag is still a stag, dragged down under three heavy bodies.

Sasha has no idea what to do, so he does the only thing he can think of and leaps into the fray, dragging the hounds off the stag, who is only a boy chosen for his athleticism and willingness to be a sacrifice, after all.

The hounds, who are only visitors, back away, low to the ground and wary as Sasha places a hand over the wound in Kuznetsov’s side, blood still rushing out, a heavy, salted tang reaching the back of his throat.

Kuznetsov rolls one large, golden eye at him, breath puffing out in huge gouts from his furred nostrils. Somehow, Sasha thinks that if he could talk he would be calling Sasha a fucking liar. “I’m sorry,” Sasha tells him, helplessly. “I—“

“Let me help,” Nicky says, appearing behind him, one moment at a distance and the next pressed against Sasha’s back. He moves past him, kneeling beside him, staring intently at Kuznetsov, trapped and silent, whose furry face takes on a distinctly judgmental cast.

Sasha watches as he dips a finger in the wound, then, in a strange parody of so many of Sasha’s most embarrassing dreams, paints it across his mouth.

Sasha only just catches his breath in time for Nicky to kiss him.

There is a shuddering crack of magic breaking, and the forest around them turns a bright, furious green.

The sound of it, the sheer unexpected blast of magic so primal and strange sends a thrum of need and longing through him so deeply that Sasha thinks he might have spilled himself without a single touch.

There’s a yelp, and then the hounds are Andre, Marcus and Philipp again, and the stag is just Kuznetsov, bundled in his grey robes, sprawled blinking and owlish in the bloodied snow. “Ow,” he mutters, checking his ribs for rents and flopping back into the pink slush when he finds none. “Motherfucker.”

“What the fuck was that?” Sasha demands, grabbing at Nicky’s face, staring at him, uncaring at the stickiness of his bloodied hands against Nicky’s smooth cheeks.

“We might be in trouble,” Nicky whispers, tipping into Sasha’s grip. “You might as well kiss me again.”

“What the fuck,” Sasha whispers again, but he does. After months of wanting, it feels as though the forest itself is giving him permission as much as Nicky’s hands slipping under his robes, hot like coals against Sasha’s sweat-slicked skin.

“Oh, come _on,_ ” Andre says, blood in his teeth making his grimace distinctly ghoulish as he gathers Marcus and Philipp and kneels by Kuznetsov to lay his bright red cloak over him.

Part of Sasha is relieved that at least one part of the ritual is going well, but the rest of him is occupied by the feel of Nicky’s sharp teeth on his lips and the metallic burst of blood on his tongue and the thrum of magic lingering like static in his palms.

“It’s like watching my parents after dinner,” Kuznetsov tells Andre, tucking himself tighter into the red wool. “We all thought Bäckström hated him.”

“That’s just his face,” Andre explains, and then Nicky grabs Sasha by the hair, and the rest of it is just the press of pillowy snow against his back as he lays down and the heavy weight of Nicky above him.

_/\\_

There’s no getting around it: the forest is alive now.

Sasha comes back to his senses as the sky lightens to its late-November grey to be greeted by a riot of green. At first he thinks it’s the light of the aurora still, then he realises it’s the leaves, birches and pines ringing them in a perfect circle all shades of green from an acidic near-yellow to deep emerald peeking out from under a thick fall of new snow.

Nicky is holding him, leaning up against a pine with his long arms looped around Sasha’s middle and his chest pressed flush to Sasha’s back. From Sasha’s limited viewpoint with his head resting on Nicky’s warm shoulder, he can see the edge of his jaw, the long strip of his neck, and the very edge of his cheekbone.

Sasha’s mouth tastes like iron and his entire body feels sticky. “Ugh,” he offers, experimentally.

Across the clearing, Andre, Marcus, Philipp and Kuznetsov are playing some kind of game in the snow with green twigs and a fair amount of laughter, considering they’re all still covered in copious amount of dried blood.

The Hunt should have found them by now. There should be— there should be adults. There should be Kharlamov’s ghost staring dispassionately at Sasha from the afterlife the way he does in Transfiguration lessons when Sasha can only make his frog into a frog of a slightly different colour. There should be Maltsev, who should probably be yelling. “Where is everyone?” he asks, quietly, unwilling to break the peace.

He never wants to leave the circle of Bäckström’s arms, which is alarming all on its own.

“The clearing won’t let us out,” Nicky says, his voice a smooth vibrato against Sasha’s spine.

“What happened?”

Nicky sighs. “I got carried away.”

“I’m going to need a little more information,” Sasha says, in what he considers to be a very measured tone, considering he’s covered in blood and other things and hearing Nicky speak Russian is still turning his heart sideways.

“Do you want to know why I got expelled from Durmstrang?” Nicky asks, instead.

Sasha thinks he’s been quite subtle about the whole burning curiosity thing, considering, so he swallows the desperate jump of it in his throat and just nods.

“Pureblood can mean a lot of things,” Nicky says. “It turns out you can still go if you’re purely magical, even if one of your parents is a Skogsrå, and not a wizard.”

Sasha thinks this would be more of a revelation if he hadn’t just spent a feast night following Nicky through the woods, which in hindsight, makes a frightening amount of sense. “But you’re so mean,” Sasha says, because even in the near-light of day, Nicky still makes him stupid. Apparently even having his every embarrassing sex dream come true does nothing to diminish Nicky’s effect on him, which is something Sasha is going to have to deal with at some point. Soon. Maybe.

Nicky laughs. “You have no idea.”

“Wait, so— they expelled you for not being—“

Nicky huffs impatiently. “No. They expelled me for growing a truth spell under the castle.”

“…Why?”

Sasha can’t see the whole of Nicky’s face, but he thinks he might be smirking. “Because there’s only so many times I want to hear people lying to my face,” he says. “I’d rather see them thinking I’m a freak in flames above their heads, wouldn’t you?”

“No,” Sasha tells him, with complete honesty. “I’d rather make them say it.”

“You know, at first I thought you were just stupid, but now I think— you still think it’s worth it to be good. I like it.” Nicky cards a hand through his hair, and the warm drag of his fingernails on Sasha’s scalp nearly draws an unholy moan out of him. “I don’t think Ullr is too angry about sharing his blood with us,” Nicky says, repeating the motion. “All gods who demand death need life to get it, and nobody’s better at life than humans.”

Sasha attempts to digest this, breathing the fresh, verdant air under the everlasting smell of blood. he wants to ask how Nicky can possibly know that, how he can pronounce it with such certainty, when Sasha himself has wondered quietly all his life why it seems so easy for people to fall to darkness, when the darkness he loves is the kind that only exists to make the light all the brighter, but all he manages is: “wait, you like me?”

“I didn’t say that,” Nicky points out, but he’s still holding Sasha, so Sasha thinks he might be something of a liar himself.

“What now?” Sasha asks, hoping the answer is “we lay here until moonrise, and then go again, and possibly a third time, and make sure the juniors aren’t watching.”

“Now you get to ask Ullr to release us, Hunstman,” Nicky says, with a sharp slash of sarcasm. “He definitely doesn’t want to hear it from me.”

_/\\_

There is something to be said for stumbling out of a forest made real in the early hours of a polar morning covered in blood and trailing a Swedish nymph, three visiting students and one excited first-year relieved to be alive.

Mostly that “something” is a well-rehearsed apology to Andre, Marcus, Philipp and Kuznetsov, who seem to have formed some kind of quadratic equation of solidarity in studiously ignoring the culmination of Sasha and Nicky’s… life ritual… for lack of better words. The rest of it will come in time, or when they have to make something up on the fly.

None of them have washed, and the dried blood is shedding off them in flakes, leaving rusted stains around their mouths. Sasha knows they’ll have to leave it until they get back to Durmstrang, as part of the exchange, but he’s beginning to feel grimy and tired, his eyes gritty with exhaustion and his legs heavy from exertion, so he can only imagine how they must be enduring it.

Nicky, as blood-streaked as the rest of them, still manages to look fresher somehow, fingers leaving melted trails behind them as he drags them over the new leaves sprouting on the birches.

Sasha leads the way, because he might as well. He isn’t the Hunstman anymore, any more than the visitors are hounds.

Every member of the faculty is waiting for them, silent and blank-faced, standing vigil outside the boundary.

“I can explain,” Sasha offers, even though he can’t, and doesn’t really want to.

“No you can’t,” Nicky says, sharp and close, bumping his shoulder. “I’ve already been expelled once,” he murmurs quietly. “It’s not that bad.”

“Nobody is getting expelled,” Sasha insists. On a whim, or some kind of dangerous impulse that leaps in him at the thought of Nicky’s expulsion, Sasha grabs his hand. If Sasha thought Nicky might pull away, he’s wrong, because for all of Nicky’s new bravado, he grips back, fingers laced in with Sasha’s. Where they touch Sasha feels something that might be an ache, but isn’t, really. It’s more like a new kind of longing, the sensation of rejoicing at the mere thought of fire after a long time out on the taiga. “We can explain,” Sasha says, a little bit louder.

Nicky looks at him, a sidelong glance, green eyes and blood-reddened lips bright in the grey dawn, and Sasha’s determination to do everything in his power to make sure he stays here crystallises like sea ice, frozen into jagged, glittering shape.

“This ought to be good,” Kuznetsov mutters quietly, prompting a muffled snort from Andre.

“We give thanks to Ullr,” Headmaster Kharlamov’s ghost says, raising both translucent arms to the sky, “for granting the favour of true life at last.”

“What?” Sasha says, idiotically.

“True life!” Headmaster Maltsev echoes, going to his knees in the snow, along with every other member of the faculty.

Over the sea of bowed heads, Khlarlamov’s ghost winks at them, and presses a finger to his lips.

_/\\_

Nicky comes with him, Dima, Olesia, Headmaster Maltsev and Headmaster Kharlamov’s ghost to see the Durmstrang students off, even though he’s not a prefect, because Sasha brings him and nobody objects, which is good enough for Sasha to take as permission.

There are a lot of ritual words to be spoken to give them back to Durmstrang, and the three of them are starting to look worse for wear, blood-stained clothes and rusted mouths under purple-smudged eyes, but Andre drags Nicky in for a long hug anyway, burying his face in Nicky’s shoulder even though he’s significantly taller. He says something in rapid Swedish that is too quiet for Sasha to follow, but their parting looks affectionate, like something Sasha thinks only happens when two people know each other better than well.

He’s sure there’s a story there. One day, he hopes to know it.

Sasha casts a warming charm on them for the walk to their portkey, marked on the glacier by a tongue of blue flame so they don’t get lost. “Take a deep breath,” he warns them, before they step over the boundary. “It’ll be warmer at Durmstrang!”

“Not by much,” Andre mutters, taking him aside and clasping Sasha’s hand through his gloves. “Listen, don’t— he’s as human as the rest of us, okay? Don’t listen to him if he says he isn’t. Magic is magic.”

His Russian is better than Sasha’s Swedish, but Andre speaks quickly and quietly, and before Sasha can ask him to clarify, he has let go to gather Marcus and Philipp, and a bough cut from the living forest to take back to their school.

Andre says the correct formal goodbyes, pulls up his hood and then they’re gone, back into the howling Arctic wind Sasha can only hear as an echo, standing just inside the spell.

They watch until the blue light of the portkey vanishes, then Maltsev heaves an enormous sigh. “I’m going to get drunk. Nobody disturb me. Olesia, you’re in charge. Come on, Kharlamov, tonight’s the night I beat you at chess.”

They start back towards the great hall, and Sasha watches them go for a moment, letting them get a head start. Olesia glances at him, shrugs, and links her arm in with Dima’s dragging him away from Sasha and Nicky, despite his token protest.

Nicky says nothing, but doesn’t head back towards the hall, either.

“Can I sit with you at dinner tonight?” Sasha asks, unsure, for a moment, whether it’s too formal, or whether it’s not formal enough, somehow.

“Yeah, okay,” Nicky says, quietly offering a hand.

Sasha can feel the warmth of his bare palm all the way through his gloves.

_/\\_

There are a lot of things Sasha doesn’t know about forests, it turns out.

In the days after he and Nicky bring it to life, the trees stay a fecund, verdigris green, even as the true darkness creeps closer and closer and the twilight fades to a faint, bright line on the horizon.

Sasha has no idea how it will stay alive without sunlight, or what it will demand from the soil. He has no idea what part of him he’s left to it, or why it feels so utterly strange to go back to wandering the halls of Koldovstoretz and know it’s there, ringing them, a living, rustling, impossible revival of the oldest spell in Russia.

He sees to Nicky at dinner, and he spots him at a distance in the halls, and he spies him very early in the mornings on the quidditch pitch, but somehow he only ever seems to be anywhere near him at meals, Classes are still suspended while the teachers are engaged in what appears to be an excuse for a holiday with an intermittent spattering of shrugging at the forest and scribbling metres and metres of notes, so Sasha is blessed with hours and hours of time to read, and to practice, and to gently antagonise Dima into betting with him.

It seems unmysterious to Sasha, who is not concerned with the nuance of it. The things he understands come from the primacy of having been there, and having spilled blood and other things for it, and so now it is almost as though the fact of its life is just a fact and facet of his. It’s there, living and breathing, somehow, and he helped put it there, helped make it that way, but ultimately to be chosen is not necessarily to have had a choice in the matter.

He is more worried that Nicky is avoiding him.

It’s not as though Nicky is doing anything different from before, but now Sasha thinks they might have some claim to an understanding, and Sasha finds that now, having seen a bright, moonlit flash of who Nicky is when he’s not radiating disinterest, going back to quiet cordiality is slowly leaching the colour from Sasha’s days.

If Sasha were a betting man, which he most certainly is, he’d say Nicky has begun to feel awkward around him, which is so far to the left of what Sasha wants that he finds himself becoming desperate to dig out the root of it and fix it.

It’s different to how it was before the Hunt, when Nicky was a mystery and an abstract. Now Sasha has been held in his arms, and Sasha has shared spilled blood with him, and Sasha still wakes up at night with the ghostly press of Nicky’s lips lingering in his dreams. Now, he would give blood again in an instant to know what Nicky is thinking.

“I think you should really talk to him, darling,” Olga counsels, when Sasha wakes up for the third time in one night. Olga, having heard the gossip from Petra Sergeyevna, hanging in Maltsev’s office, is quite well informed. “One doesn’t leave one’s husband uncertain of his welcome, I don’t think, though I myself have never had one, and my wife was a witch of the ordinary variety.” She eats one of her painted chocolates, solicitously offering Sasha the box, though he can’t take one. “Now’s not the time for grand gestures.”

Sasha sits bold upright on the bed, shedding furs onto the floor. “Husband?”

“Well, I suppose perhaps the Skogsrå might do it differently, and you are awfully young for it, but marriages need not be binding!” She rests her rounded chin in her hand, leaning on the carved arm of her chair. “On the other hand, a union for bringing life is nothing to sneeze at. Perhaps he thinks you have regrets, being such a dashing young bachelor. And of course, he isn’t human, which does often complicate things. For instance, centaur divorce laws are quite arcane, to my recollection.”

“Yes he is,” Sasha corrects her, stuck on it, stuck on Andre’s warning. “He’s human, too.”

“Of course, love.” She frowns, biting a truffle in half with her little teeth and chewing contemplatively. “Stay here a moment.”

She gathers her skirts and rustles out of the frame. Sasha knows from past experience that it’s useless to ask the others where she’s gone; as the dowager witch of her age, Olga Andreyevna answers to none. In fact, her portrait in his room once belonged to another figure entirely, and at some point in the past hundred years or so Olga’s portrait took it over, shunting its original occupant into a carved mural on the supporting pillars just inside the Potions classroom.

Sasha expects her to be gone for quite a while, so he lays down again, staring at the rune-etched ceiling of his bed. _Husband_ has such a ring of finality to it, but Sasha finds himself wondering about it, spinning it out; what would it be like to know that as a truth and not a possibility? What does Nicky want? They barely know each other, after all, even if Sasha has come to appreciate much more about him than just the way he glares at his breakfast first thing in the morning. He doesn't feel married. In his experience, marriage is usually something agreed-upon, but yet, it doesn't seem as though it's a complete surprise. Sasha was there, after all. Sasha spilled himself and the rush of life punched the air right out of his lungs, and it was Nicky, Nicky who Sasha has been slowly unravelling for months who asked him for it. It doesn't feel bad. 

There’s a knock on his door.

Sasha, for an instant, thinks he’s imagining it, or that he’s conjured a phantom again, like he did in his first year and he was homesick and lonely.

The knock sounds again, quieter this time, so Sasha throws the remaining covers off and pads to the door in bare feet, sleeping robes a hint too short for him now hovering just above his ankles after his last growth spurt, but soft and heather-grey and smelling of laundry and home.

Sasha opens the door. Nicky stares up at him. “A portrait told me you were sad. Can I come in?” Nicky asks, hands buried deep in his robes. Sasha wonders whether he’s clutching his wand under there the way Sasha does sometimes, the smooth wooden end a comforting, familiar weight in times of distress. He's never seen him use one.

“Of course,” Sasha says, “we’re married now, right? Is that it?” He almost regrets it, but somehow he doesn’t. It's too absurd, and pushing at the edges of funny, even if it's not there yet. 

“I’m sorry,” Nicky says, staring at him, direct and unblinking. “I’m so sorry. I took from you. I wasn’t thinking. It’s just— the blood, and the moon, and—”

Urgency swells in Sasha, startled at the flood of apology. “Nicky. I don’t care. Maybe you want to break it off, don’t want me, fine. But I didn’t give anything I didn’t want to give.” Sasha pauses, judging his words, or at least trying to, but the way Nicky is looking at him is too devastating, a kind of desperate suspicion on his face that makes Sasha want to run his fingers through his hair and pull all the fear out, occlumancy of the body seeming as close to possible as it ever has. What must he have exposed at Durmstrang with his truth spell to be so summarily ejected? What must he have shoved forcibly into the light? Sasha opens his arms. “We’ll figure it out. If you want to. I want to.”

Nicky surges into his grip, only hesitant until Sasha wraps him tight and draws him into the room. Nicky breathes a long sigh against Sasha’s neck, tension still thrumming through his body, but he doesn’t pull away. “It might not be forever,” he says, and Sasha wonders if the note in his voice is hope. “If the forest dies there’s— there’ll be nothing to hold it closed.”

“Not nothing,” Sasha says, whispering it. They're too young. They don't know each other. They gave life to something with the blessing of an old god. Sasha thinks he's wonderful, sarcastic and warm and sharp in all the strangest ways. 

“I’m not— I can’t stay here. If I was a real... I'd have to stay, and I won't.” Nicky reaches a hand up and clutches a handful of Sasha’s robes, sinking further into his arms, as though he’s been holding himself slightly back even in the embrace, and it’s so far from the Nicky Sasha saw in the forest that it breaks his heart a little. “It can’t be mine to care for."

“What do you want?” Sasha asks, lips catching in his hair, strands of it coarser than they look, texture and scent better than anything Sasha could have conjured for himself in his imagination. "Where do you want to go?"

“I’m not sure,” Nicky whispers, “Is that terrible? Am I supposed to? I don’t.”

Sasha draws him towards the bed, and Nicky comes. If his eyes are a little wet, Sasha doesn’t mention it, but as they close the curtains around them and the space between them fades to perfect darkness, Sasha lays a hand on his cheek and sweeps his thumb over the rise of Nicky’s cheekbone, feeling the architecture of his face. “I want to play quidditch, Sasha confesses. “Maybe I should do more, but sometimes I think about what makes me happy, and—” he cuts himself off, articulating it for the first time and unsure how to say it right, whether to say it at all, but it seems like if he doesn’t, he may never get another chance, and Nicky is so still, so present, breathing next to him. “I want to see the sun again. I want to travel. I like animals, and I hate wine.” He swallows, feeling Nicky’s smile under his palm. “I like it when people pull my hair, and… and I do think it’s worth it to try to be good.”

Nicky’s hand comes up to cover his, and he’s furnace-warm the way he always is, but the heat that spreads through Sasha at the touch of his fingers is one of an entirely different cast. “I’m scared of dogs,” Nicky whispers, “sometimes, when I’m not paying attention, I call birds, which is hell for the mail carriers.” He strokes his fingers over the back of Sasha’s hand, and Sasha shivers. “The first time I saw you, I thought you looked like someone out of a story. The kind with dragons, and I was afraid— I thought maybe you knew what I was already, and you'd... it would be like Durmstrang.” He pauses, fingers stilling. “I want to pull your hair again.”

Sasha moves closer, drawing Nicky towards him. The kiss feels like a beginning; it’s not the first but it might not be the last, and that matters more, with nothing between them but sweet uncertainty.

_/\\_

  
The final of the interdisciplinary cup arrives just before midwinter, and the pitch is lit from all sides with the luminous vines that Nicky has carefully tended in Herbology, lending everything a warm, steady glow.

The campus is still frigid, arid and white with snow, but all around are small signs of renewal. It feels like every time Sasha wakes up there’s a new small leaf budding on the vines that have begun to cling shyly to the rafters of their room, and the lichens coating the rocks and stone of the most ancient part of the hall are growing in multitudes of colours.

Sasha will go home for the solstice, and maybe Nicky will come. Nicky will go back to Sweden when the sun returns for the summer, and maybe Sasha will visit him.

Maybe the forest will wither without its progenitors, but it is not entirely theirs any more than it was entirely Ullr’s, and forests are patient things. This one has deeper roots than two boys could possibly hope to have given it, even if the life in them is their doing.

“Keep up,” Nicky says, bumping their shoulders together as they rise off the pitch. “I’m not going to hold back for you. Together or not at all, right?”

“Promises, Nicky!” Sasha says, grinning wildly as the wind above the frozen ground buffets them halfway across the field. 

Nicky grins at him, a quick flash of teeth.

What they have is this: possibility, and the perfect unknown of youth. Sasha takes his place on Nicky’s right, facing off against the other team, ready to throw himself into it, the rush of competition thrumming between them all.

The snitch, released, darts into the shadows, and they scatter, Sasha chasing the first quaffle with perfect focus, only distantly aware that someday this will end, just as everything does.

Nicky whizzes by, a blur of green leaves and grey robes, and Sasha diverts a bludger on his tail with a kick, sending it to Dima to be beaten away.

Sasha always wants to win. That’s an absolute as much as the blue of his eyes, or the certainty of his magic. Sasha also wants to _want,_ to have that kind of drive and motion which has pushed him all along, which has led him here.

Nicky streaks past below him, face set in such a expression of terrifying focus that Sasha falls a little bit in love all over again.

Sasha catches a ball and gives chase.

He can’t see the future any more than Nicky can. The more important thing, in all ways, is what comes between the beginning and the end, and Sasha thinks they have plenty of room to grow in the meantime.

There’s so much left to know.

_/\\_

**Author's Note:**

> CONTENT NOTES: both characters who do the do here are underage, and they do it with each other somewhat under the influence of a spell. Proceed informed, there's some blood involved, it may read as dubious in some respects. A portrait comments on a student's sex life, this may also be of concern to some. Please proceed with caution.
> 
> You can find me in the woods, perched in a bare tree, hissing at passerby, or on twitter, [here.](https://twitter.com/ghostfancier)
> 
> Comments make me feel alive and let me tell you as a fledgling academic I'm 90% zombie so any shreds of life are highly appreciated


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